Accurate description of the railway network as always been a key resource to manage train circulations. To solve common problems of operation simulation requires a great amount of data of high quality. Unfortunately, open data published by infrastructure managers in Europe is not meeting expectations: poor documentation, no information on data quality, low frequency updates, missing data, heterogeneous coverage… In this talk, we will compare current railway network data availability and quality on OpenStreetMap and on company-owned open data platforms of several European countries. Based on this analysis, we will issue usage recommendations for open-source projects needing to use railway network description data. Then, we will share perspectives on the evolution of these data sources on the years to come.